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How new-found knuckleballer Tomo Ohka saved his pitching career

All appeared lost for Ohka just a few years ago, until he found a way to revitalize his once-promising career on the mound.

Singing a minor-league deal with the Blue Jays has allowed Tomo Ohka, right, to hone his craft alongside R.A. Dickey, the only knuckleballer to ever win the Cy Young Award. (Chris So / Toronto Star) | Order this photo

By Brad LeftonSpecial To The Star

Wed., Feb. 26, 2014

KYOTO, JAPAN—Tomo Ohka reached into his equipment bag before a recent workout. His glove was there and so was his ball, but he couldn’t find what he was digging around for. He ran inside and after a few minutes, reappeared with the missing tool — a file for his fingernails.

The soon-to-be-38-year-old has transformed himself into a knuckleballer, and is still getting accustomed to the daily requirement of maintaining his nails.

The last time he pitched for the Blue Jays, in 2007, Ohka was 31 and near the end of a once-promising Major League Baseball career as a conventional pitcher with solid control. After bouncing around to the systems of several MLB teams and eventually to Mexico and Japan, things looked bleak. Then, less than a year ago, he did something no pitcher had ever done in Japan — he taught himself to throw a knuckleball.

“I put too much into the game to just walk away without giving the last resort option a chance. Every pitcher who loves what they do has at least played around with a knuckleball grip at some point. Now it was no longer a joke pitch; it was my saviour and I decided to give it my heart and soul.”

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The Blue Jays were impressed enough with his progress that they offered him a minor-league deal with an invite to the major-league camp. And so, despite all the hoopla over Masahiro Tanaka signing a big free-agent contract with the Yankees, the spring’s most remarkable pitching story from Japan may actually be unfolding in the Blue Jays camp.

Back in 2004, Ohka was 28 and emerging as a promising pitcher for the Montreal Expos. He’d worked 199 innings the previous year and was in his third season as a full-time starter. On June 10 of that year, he took the mound in Kansas City, looking for his fourth straight victory.

But everything changed when Carlos Beltran drilled a two-out line drive right back at him. The ball smashed off Ohka’s pitching wrist, shattering his radius — the biggest bone in the forearm — near his right thumb. The gruesome injury required nine screws and a titanium plate to hold the bone fragments together.

Ohka recovered well enough from the injury to appear in 112 more games for four different franchises, including the Blue Jays, over the following five years. But he was never able to recapture the consistency that he seemed to be grasping at the time of his injury.

He returned to Japan and had two lacklustre seasons in 2010-11, undergoing surgery on his right shoulder late in the 2011 campaign. He found himself without a team in 2012, left to train on his own in the hope that he’d regain his form enough to attract an offer from someone.

When the only offer came from a Japanese independent-league team, Ohka realized his career as a conventional pitcher was essentially over. But, not content to have his career snuffed out so meekly, he entrusted his life’s work to mastering a pitch never before perfected in Japanese professional ball.

That presented a problem — there was no one in Japan to teach him.

“I scoured the internet for images of knuckleballers,” Ohka recalls. “There’s not much out there, so I probably watched the same stuff a thousand times. I bought a net for my garage and just threw hundreds of knuckleballs into it every day. Between that and throwing it from a mound, I’ll bet I threw many hundred knuckleballs a day. Sometimes my fingers would start bleeding.”

As he experimented with grips and searched for the secret to removing the spin from his pitches, he had his eureka moment.

“I had been overusing my fingernails for a long time,” he recalls. “Then one day, I just discovered a better feel when I used the skin on the tips of my fingers. That meant filing the nails down so they wouldn’t get in the way.”

It also meant remembering to pack his equipment bag with the nail file.

That’s when the Blue Jays took notice, and realized another knuckleballer would help their catchers better prepare for R.A. Dickey in spring training. It’s a two-way street, since Ohka now gets to perfect his craft while getting advice from the only knuckleballer to ever win the Cy Young Award.

While Ohka’s comeback bid may seem unlikely, his past performance suggests he shouldn’t be ruled out.

He was one of the first pitchers to come to MLB from Japan, back in 1997, but he wasn’t arriving as a big star seeking a new challenge. He was young and unproven, with just a single victory in Nippon Professional Baseball.

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